June 29, 2013
I remember this magazine, and especially the comic book ads for this magazine, but I was just a little too young to appreciate it. I saw it on the stands but I am not sure if I ever bought it. A Marvel Comics magazine, it featured articles on comics, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, as well as all kinds of pop culture and music. Pizzazz only ran 16 issues, from October 1977 to January 1979, so I was just 7 or 8 when this hit the stands, a few years too young to really be interested. And too bad, since I would have loved the cover featuring Superman, The Movie. (The caption from Superman on the cover reads: “I consider it the greatest honor of my long career to be on the cover of a Marvel magazine.” DC and Marvel are fierce competitors, then and now.)
Stan Lee never looked this good in his life.
Here is the Wikipedia entry, which is decidedly short on pizazz:
Recurring features included a comic about Amy Carter’s life as the President’s daughter, a serialized Star Wars comic, and a one-page comic by Harvey Kurtzman (typically a “Hey Look!” piece done for the Marvel predecessor Timely Comics in the 1940s) on the last page. Regular columns included the reader dream-analyzing “Dream Dimensions” and the advice column “Dear Wendy.” Once the magazine was established, a regular feature was a full-page illustration of some crowded scene in which the names of readers who had written letters to the magazine were hidden. The covers showed either photos of popular celebrities, or photo-realistic drawings of celebrities and/or Marvel superheroes. Shaun Cassidy was featured on six covers, The Hulk appeared on five covers, Spider-Man on four, and Peter Frampton on three.
Topics mentioned in the magazine included (but weren’t limited to):
- The original Star Wars movie
- Grease
- Meat Loaf
- The movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Battlestar Galactica
- Superman: The Movie
The early installments of the serialized Star Wars comic featured in Pizzazz have the distinction of being the first original (i.e., not directly adapted from the films) Star Wars material to appear in print form, preceding the 1978 novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by several months, as well as the introduction of original stories in Marvel’s own monthly Star Wars title.
Six Shaun Cassidy covers? SWOON! (And one Meat Loaf. One sweaty bloated Meat Loaf cover.)
I now leave you with a gallery of all sixteen covers of a magazine which, had I been a little older, I would have been all over. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.
Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride 
Ouch, this is the kind of thing you wish you had bought and preserved…
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Dynamite was a very similar magazine which I had many issues of a few years later. I was just a little too young to be interested in Pizzazz.
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Looks like they were going for a fairly broad demographic!
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